IV Insights Blog

Posts tagged: C-suite

It’s an important time in the transportation industry as the consumer depends on technology to stay connected with their professional and social networks. This dependency is driving consumer electronics, connectivity, and information technologies rapidly to converge in automotive and other transportation industries. Automotive companies are finding the need to maintain access to a wide array of relevant patents, not traditionally available in the automotive space.

What makes an organization unusually successful? What’s the real difference between innovation and invention? What can executives learn about innovation through a historical lens? This week’s News You Can Use highlights stories about ways companies leverage the answers to these questions for success.

Company executives can have an enormous amount of influence on an economy’s collective good—from economic progress and industry collaboration to individual entrepreneurship. Whether influence comes from instilling innovation as a cornerstone of growth, or offering timely insight on how to keep businesses relevant in a fast-changing climate, this week’s News You Can Use underscores the C-suite’s power in driving economic opportunity.

Executives play a key role in setting the tone for their companies when it comes to fostering innovative environments. In this edition of News You Can Use, we’re highlighting interesting stories from the past week focusing on the C-suite’s outlook on innovation.

Are you putting intellectual property (IP) to work for your company? Those at the helm of both large and small companies recognize that safeguarding patented assets is crucial to developing and maintaining a competitive edge. In fact, 70 percent of business leaders who participated in a market research on patent attitudes study last year believe patents are good for innovation. And yet only one quarter of those decision makers feel patent savvy.

When Intellectual Ventures acquired the Kodak digital imaging patent portfolio in 2013, we helped execute one of the largest, most complex patent sales in history. But more importantly, we helped provide our customers efficient access to the invention rights.

Adriane Brown, Intellectual Venture’s President and COO, was honored last night by Legal Momentum with a Women of Achievement Award, celebrating the accomplishments of extraordinary women in business, law, and public service.

Russell L. Stein, Intellectual Ventures’ CFO, was honored last week by Seattle Business Magazine with a 2014 Executive Excellence Award, among fellow C-suite leaders who have played a vital role in the success of Washington State’s businesses and philanthropic organizations.

In the fifth and final post of our “Expert Insights” series, we asked what value Intellectual Ventures (IV) brings to customers and the IP market at large. Each video provides a unique perspective on IV’s impact - from making deals more efficient, to setting market values to changing the lives of inventors.

Patents are crucial for businesses of all types and sizes, from startups to major corporations. Many small companies and their founding entrepreneurs recognize both the importance and necessity of having a patent strategy, but oftentimes they lack the resources to adequately protect themselves, or to support future product development. For many, it is also a race to build up a patent portfolio ahead of their competition. It can take years to build a patent portfolio to protect one’s business.

Last week, our fair city of Seattle hosted the Licensing Executives Society (LES) annual Spring Meeting. LES is an independent, professional organization that facilitates global IP commerce, and their conferences always mark an important event in Intellectual Ventures’ calendar for the insight they offer into issues that span industries and invention areas.

For years, Intellectual Ventures has been talking to CEOs, CFOs, and CTOs about the value of intellectual property. Contrary to what some others might suggest, we believe the issue being discussed in America’s boardrooms—in companies of all sizes and across industries—is not whether patents matter, but how they matter.

Since 2003, Intellectual Ventures has completed more than 1,800 acquisition deals, and today we closed one of the largest and most complex acquisitions in our history. A consortium of 12 technology companies, organized by IV and RPX, licensed and purchased a portfolio of digital imaging patents for more than $525 million from Kodak.

Intellectual Ventures is in the business of great ideas. Whether through our own inventions, collaboration with our global network of inventors or traditional acquisitions, we focus on creating, identifying, and commercializing the best ideas in the world.

I sat on a panel about IP transaction trends in Europe at the recent IP Business Congress (IPBC 2012). In the subsequent Q&A session, I was asked about the need for more IP awareness education in the C-suite. As patents increasingly become top-of-mind for business executives, how can we ensure that these issues are clearly understood by non-IP stakeholders?

This month’s News You Can Use shares articles for every age of the family. We learn whether inventiveness can run in the family, why companies should see IP as a corporate asset, and what to expect from Microsoft’s new tablet:

Intellectual Ventures CEO Nathan Myhrvold recently appeared on CNN Money, where he discussed the growing importance of patents to the technology industry. Nathan touched on the evolution of Silicon Valley’s perspective on patents over the last decade, and how a strong invention capital market and effective patent reform could help buoy the U.S. economy amid financial turmoil:

Today’s edition of the Wall Street Journal includes a letter to the editor from Peter Detkin, founder and vice chairman of Intellectual Ventures. Peter’s letter addresses an August 22 editorial by Gordon Crovitz on the U.S. patent system, and discusses Google’s recent acquisition of Motorola Mobility as an example of how the system has evolved to treat patents as a liquid form of capital.

IV’s Executive Vice President and Head of Japan Masanobu Katoh was the keynote speaker at the Fuji-Sankei IP Business Forum 2011, held on June 27th in Tokyo, Japan. The audience of nearly 400 corporate planning and IP professionals from many of Japan’s leading manufacturers and law firms paid close attention as Katoh walked them through a description of recent trends in both the IT and the IP industries. Specifically, Katoh talked about how the term “IP” has come to have two significant meanings in “Internet Protocol” and “Intellectual Property.” Increasingly these two different worlds are converging, resulting in an environment where professionals who work in one or the other area increasingly need skills in both.

As the world just learned, a consortium of rival technology companies, including Apple, Microsoft, RIM, Sony, Ericsson and EMC, outbid Google and its partners in a $4.5 billion mega-purchase for the rights to a patent portfolio from Nortel Networks. By all accounts this is an unprecedented event, in terms of size (~6,000 patents), dollar value (~$750,000 per protected idea) and its potential impact on the mobile computing industry.

Last week we attended the IP Business Congress 2011 in San Francisco, which is organized by IAM magazine. We tweeted live from many of the panels, and you can take a look at our Twitter feed or the #ipbc topic for commentary and reporting from the conference. It was fun to see commentary pop through the Twitter feed from many different attendees.